


Calm Seas

by HardingHightown



Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-20 05:16:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18986029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HardingHightown/pseuds/HardingHightown
Summary: When she had imagined what love might be, back in the bedsheets of her mistresses house in Old Valia, she imagined something that glowed a warm pulsating red in the corner of her mind like it did when she read the minds of the nobles at the parties.





	Calm Seas

When she imagined what love might be, back in the bedsheets of her mistresses house in Old Valia, she imagined something that glowed a warm pulsating red in the corner of her psyche like it did when she read the minds of the nobles of the family who kept her at their parties. She imagined long, hot kisses and stolen looks across the rooms. She imagined a faceless, strong body holding her and making her shake with desire or fear or something in between. She imagined belonging to somebody in a wholly different way to belonging to the mistress, belonging in a way that made her want to surrender entirely because it was her choice, not because it was her contract.

When she gathered her coins after years of servitude and paid off her debt, it was love that she held in her heart whilst her mistress brushed her hair one hundred times for the last time, sobbing loudly and kissing her furry ears between each stroke. It was the promise of love that kept her resolve when she stepped outside of the gates of the estate for the first time in her entire life, her feet quaking until she reached the boat and locked herself in the smallest corner of her cabin for the duration.

When she came to answer for herself, in a campsite in the Dyrwood with her very first friend, she knew that she was looking for love, and that was what love was.

And she waited.

The Dyrwood took from her. It took and it took, from the corners of her soul tearing in the games of the gods to the long years spent away from the comfort of Vela, the tiny creature who held all the promise she never had. The more she built her home in the castle, the further she was taken from it. The more time she spent in a land that wasn’t hers fighting battles she never truly understood. The more she wondered why she’d left to build her own life when it was hard, so hard, to pick up the mantle she had been given. The title of Watcher felt heavy on her, a calling she had not asked for, and in those early days it soured the corners of her soul in deep black that she could not shake.

Sometimes in the quiet of camp she would sit with Hiravias and ask him to prepare food for her. He always obliged, pulling together rich raw meats and herbs that tasted bitter on her tongue and stuck in her throat. He told her that she just had to find her true Orlan palette, that her Vailian days had made her soft, but the taste never came to her. He would speak in broad, reaching tones that enraptured her, filling her mind with vast fields and forests of green, pushing her mind broader and broader in an intoxication. Somedays on her own, she would strip away her jewelry, her clothing, take her long hair down from her ribbons and be, as he was, just an Orlan. She would reach for that nature that came so naturally to him, reach for what she truly was, but all she found was that void waiting for her. 

She missed him most when they all left.

He was always one she knew would disappear back into the wilds. Some of her companions were always going to pull away quickly into their lives again. Pallegina was the first, eager to return to her keepers, but none of them stayed more than a few moons. Eder leaving surprised her the most - she had assumed he would stay at her side forever. One by one they returned to their own lives, their own missions, their own callings, and she sat in the empty halls of a castle she never wanted in a land that felt like it was not hers.

She wished she could have loved it. She felt guilty that she didn’t miss it.

The Archipelago was a different beast to the land she had found herself in, full of towering Aumauna and also familiarly Orlan faces. Some servants, yes, but others not. Serafen filled her senses with a burning yellow light from the moment he stood in front of her, a mirror in form to her, looking straight into her eyes in a way that made her skin prickle. He was the first Orlan she had met since her parents who had the same colouring, even if his fur was long and matted where hers grew short and soft, and when their eyes met she thought, just maybe, that this was home at last. She ached when he touched her roughly, felt a choke in her throat when he called her pretty thing, and a fire in her that she had long since forgotten when they killed every last soul at Crookspur.

Nothing felt the same after Crookspur. He had awakened something in her, something that had been missing, but the head of Master Kua in the deck hold haunted both of them. The more she saw it speaking to her in her dreams, the more she tried to lock him out of her mind. The more she tried to hold to that feeling of love, the more she knew that Serafen did not and could not love her. 

The head of Master Kua haunted her long after she threw it at the feet of Ruasere.

For a while she believed that she had cut out her heart when she cut off the Orlan’s head, that she had locked off all the parts of her that felt when she tried to protect her pain from the probing of Serafen. For a while, she contented herself with Duty, as she had done in the halls of Caed Nua, building her crew as her family, teaching Vela to braid rope and cook the foods Hiravias had shown her. For a while, that had felt like enough to stay on course.

Her love for Aloth slid into her mind with such a subtlety she missed it at first, like a spring of water through a crack in the hull, gently seeping through the smallest gaps in her resistance. It was so quiet she couldn’t feel it, even as he smiled at her and only her in the world, even as he held quiet and strong with pride next to her. She only knew it from the brush of his fingers against hers, from the way he would read to her when they could not catch a wind, from the care in which he would cut up fruit and pass her slices with a trembling hand. From the moment they first kissed, it felt as if one hundred turns of the wheel spun into place as she recalled the small ways in which she had reached to him over the past eight years, the ways in which she had learned from him, the small kindnesses that she had held in her heart.

When she had imagined what love might be, back in the bedsheets of her mistresses house in Old Valia, she imagined something that glowed a warm pulsating red in the corner of her mind like it did when she read the minds of the nobles at the parties. Now, with her head in Aloth’s lap, listening to him recite his favourite poems, feeling the softness of his fingers combing the lengths of her hair, she sees it is a pure white, stretching for as far as her mind will look.


End file.
